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      Film Forum Is Reopening With a Classic: Fellini’s ‘La Strada’

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      The newly restored masterpiece, about an itinerant clown, is part of the Manhattan movie theater’s in-person lineup.“La Strada,” the 1954 movie that made Federico Fellini’s international reputation and won the first competitive Oscar for best foreign film, is exemplary pop modernism — an existential parable with affinities to “Waiting for Godot,” featuring an appealingly sad clown, haunted by a forlorn musical phrase and set in the timeless landscape of windswept beaches, tattered carnivals and deserted piazzas that Fellini made his own.It’s also a crowd pleaser, appropriately chosen as one of the movies that, newly restored, will reopen the Film Forum on Friday.Fellini is out to break your heart from the get-go, as the wide-eyed waif Gelsomina (the director’s wife, Giulietta Masina) is sold by her impoverished mother to the itinerant carnival strongman Zampano (Anthony Quinn) as his stooge, servant and concubine.Gelsomina’s childlike innocence is amplified by her master’s brutish behavior. While he is largely stuck with repeating a single, unimaginative stunt — ironically, it’s bursting a chain that encircles his chest — simple-minded Gelsomina delights in fantasy and spontaneous performance. In one scene, she entertains the guests and children at an outdoor wedding with an impromptu dance; in another she enchants the sisters in a convent that gives her shelter (and Zampano considers robbing).Masina’s performance is nearly silent; unmistakably Chaplinesque with her derby, oversized coat and makeshift cane, she also evokes Stan Laurel, Harpo Marx and, as a little woodenhead, Pinocchio too. Fellini is said to have received scores of offers to make further vehicles for the character, including one from Walt Disney. E.T. may be considered among her descendants.The New York Times hailed “La Strada” (The Road) as “a tribute to the Italian neo-realistic school of filmmaking,” even though, for all its desolate locations, it is far more allegorical than naturalistic. Indeed, Fellini’s metaphoric intentions are made apparent with the introduction of the itinerant tightrope walker called the Fool (Richard Basehart) who performs wearing a pair of cardboard angel wings.Despite his annoyingly dubbed giggle, the Fool fascinates Gelsomina. When all three characters are engaged by a threadbare circus, the Fool mocks Zampano and encourages Gelsomina to join his act. That she cannot do, bound to Zampano by a mystical force that can only be termed “love.” Instead, the Fool leaves her with the poignant Nino Rota melody that becomes her theme.Like that refrain, “La Strada” belongs to Masina. Still, before the movie ends it becomes apparent that Quinn (who took over Marlon Brando’s role in the Broadway production of “A Streetcar Named Desire,” a precursor of roughneck masculinity) has given a career performance. Indeed, the last five minutes, a coda set five years after the two part ways, are his.“La Strada” is often sentimental and not always convincing but the ending packs a wallop. I was told the story, as a small child, by my mother who had just seen and perhaps been devastated by the movie. Although I did not fully understand it, the final scene — Zampano wading into the sea — has stayed with me all my life.La StradaApril 2-8 at Film Forum, Manhattan. 212-727-8110; filmforum.org. Also streaming on the Criterion Channel, Kanopy and other platforms. More

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      New York Theaters Are Dark, but These Windows Light Up With Art

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      The Irish Repertory Theater is streaming poetry readings, and Playwrights Horizons and St. Ann’s Warehouse are showcasing art dealing with race and injustice.Like many cultural organizations, the Irish Repertory Theater in Manhattan has streamed pandemic programming on its website.But a few days ago, the theater added a new sort of broadcast to its repertoire, setting up two 60-inch screens in windows that face the sidewalk, installing speakers high up on the building facade and airing a collection of films that show people reading poems in Ireland, London and New York.On a recent morning, Ciaran O’Reilly, the Rep’s producing director, stood by the theater on West 22nd Street, gazing at the screens as they displayed Joseph Aldous, an actor in Britain, reading “An Advancement of Learning,” a narrative poem by Seamus Heaney describing a brief standoff with a rat along a river bank.“These are not dark windows,” O’Reilly said. “They are lit up with poetry, with music, with the words of actors who are performing.”In the past year, theaters and other performing arts institutions in New York have turned to creative means to bring works to the public, sometimes also injecting a bit of life into otherwise shuttered facades. Those arrangements continue, even as the State of New York has announced that arts venues can reopen in April at one-third capacity and some outdoor performances, like Shakespeare in the Park, are scheduled to resume.The panes of glass, though, have provided a safe space. Late last year, for instance, the artists Christopher Williams, Holly Bass and Raja Feather Kelly performed at different times in the lobby or in a smaller vestibule-like part of the building in Chelsea occupied by New York Live Arts. All were visible through glass to those outside.Three more performances by Kelly of “Hysteria,” in which he assumes the role of a pink-hued extraterrestrial and explores what Live Arts’ website calls “pop culture and its displacement of queer Black subjectivity,” are scheduled for April 8-10.The Mexican-American artist Ken Gonzales-Day’s photographs of sculptures are on display at Playwrights Horizons.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnother street-level performance took place behind glass last December in Downtown Brooklyn, where the Brooklyn Ballet staged nine 20-minute shows of select dances from its “Nutcracker.”The ballet turned its studio into what its artistic director, Lynn Parkerson, called a “jewel box” theater; chose dances that kept masked ballerinas socially distanced; and used barricades on the sidewalk to limit audiences.“It was a way to bring some people back to something they love that they enjoyed that they might be forgetting about,” Parkerson said in an interview. “It did feel like a real performance.”She said that live performances were planned for April and would include ballet members in “Pas de Deux,” set to Jean-Philippe Rameau’s “Gavotte et Six Doubles,” with live music by the pianist Simone Dinnerstein.Pop-up concerts have been arranged by the Kaufman Music Center on the Upper West Side, in a storefront — the address is not given but is described on the center’s website as “not hard to find” — north of Columbus Circle.Those performances, running through late April, are announced at the storefront the same day, to limit crowd sizes and encourage social distancing. Participants have included the violinist Gil Shaham, the mezzo-soprano Chrystal E. Williams, the Gabrielle Stravelli Trio and JACK Quartet.St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn is displaying Julian Alexander and Khadijat Oseni’s “Supremacy Project,” public art that addresses the nature of injustice in American society.The word “supremacy” is superimposed on a photograph of police officers in riot gear, and there are images by Michael T. Boyd of Sandra Bland, Elijah McClain and Emmett Till.And at Playwrights Horizons in Midtown, the Mexican-American artist Ken Gonzales-Day is placing photographs of sculptures of human figures in display cases, encouraging viewers to reckon with definitions of beauty and race. Those displays are part of rotating public art series organized by the artist, activist, and writer Avram Finkelstein and the set and costume designer David Zinn.The aim, Finkelstein said in January when the series was announced, was to display work that “makes constructive use of dormant facades to create a transient street museum” and to “remind the city of its buoyancy and originality.”O’Reilly, at the Irish Rep, said the theater heard last year from Amy Holmes, the executive director of the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation, who thought the theater might provide a good venue to air some of the short films the organization had commissioned to make poetry part of an immersive experience.The series being shown at the theater, called “Poetic Reflections: Words Upon the Window Pane,” comprises 21 short pieces by the Irish filmmaker Matthew Thompson.“These are not dark windows,” said Ciaran O’Reilly of the Irish Repertory Theater. “They are lit up with poetry, with music, with the words of actors who are performing.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThey show contemporary poets reading their own works as well as poets and actors reading works by others, including William Butler Yeats and J.M. Synge, and were produced in collaboration with Poetry Ireland in Dublin, Druid Theater in Galway, the 92nd Street Y in New York and Poet in the City in London.“I think there is something special about encountering the arts in an unexpected way in the city, especially an art form like poetry,” Holmes said.The readers in the films include people who were born in Ireland, immigrants to Ireland, people who live in Britain and a few from the United States, like Denice Frohman, who was born and raised in New York City.Frohman was on the theater’s screens on Tuesday night, reading lines like “the beaches are gated & no one knows the names of the dead” from her poem “Puertopia,” when Erin Madorsky and Dorian Baker stopped to listen.Baker said he saw the films playing in the window as symbolizing a “revitalization of poetic energy.”Madorsky had regularly attended theatrical performances before the pandemic but now missed that connection, she said, and was gratified to happen upon a dramatic reading while walking home.She added that the sound of the verses being read stood in contrast to what she called the city’s “standard” backdrop of blaring horns, sirens and rumbling garbage trucks.“I think it’s wonderful,” she said. “There’s something so soothing about her voice, it just pulled me in.” More

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      A 'Blade Runner' Version of Manhattan

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeFall in Love: With TenorsConsider: Miniature GroceriesSpend 24 Hours: With Andra DayGet: A Wildlife CameraCredit…John Taggart for The New York TimesAm I in Manhattan? Or Another Sequel to ‘Blade Runner’?Flickering screens, whizzing helicopters and repurposed patches of pavement have transformed the scene.Credit…John Taggart for The New York TimesSupported byContinue reading the main storyMarch 11, 2021, 3:00 a.m. ETIf you have been drinking too much while looking at pictures of real life (or at least Instagram life), if you spend more time talking to machines than living creatures, if you’ve been wondering if you’re alive, if you have an itch you can’t scratch, if you think you have a condition called accelerating decrepitude, if you live in a building of empty apartments, there may be a movie that speaks to you, and that movie came out almost 40 years ago. It’s called “Blade Runner.”Since its 1982 debut, “Blade Runner,” set in a phosphorescent, futuristic Los Angeles and directed by Ridley Scott, has tempted fans to see it as coming to life, well, everywhere. The film’s motifs — gorgeously derelict prewar high-rises, the aesthetic influence of Asia’s megacities, massive LED screens — have become visual shorthand for The Future: Down and Out (but Dark and Sexy) Version.Purists insist that it is a Los Angeles movie, but posts tagged #bladerunner linked to places as disparate as Istanbul, Tijuana, Milan, Nairobi and Detroit typically appear on Instagram every 10 minutes or so.Few of those places resemble the movie as much as still mostly locked-down Manhattan, where a starker, lonelier, more class-riven update of the film’s retro-noir mood has taken hold. The filmmakers behind “Blade Runner” originally found inspiration in New York, and that was before the city incarnated its post-apocalyptic setting in which “anyone with the wherewithal has presumably gone away,” as Janet Maslin wrote in 1982. “Only the dregs remain.”A jumbo flashing billboard that was once the CNN logo, near Columbus Circle in Manhattan late in February.Credit…John Taggart for The New York TimesAdrian Benepe, the former New York City Parks Commissioner and current head of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, sees “creeping Blade Runner syndrome” everywhere, from the clogged skies over Manhattan to the subways, which he rides to work every day from his home on the Upper West Side.“They’re empty,” Mr. Benepe said. “I’ve been alone many times at rush hour. It’s eerie as hell.” He also finds the movie prescient in its depiction of a world saturated by intrusive, omnipresent advertising.“Places in New York that used to not have advertising now have ads,” he said. “You can’t get away from it. It’s in the subways, it’s on the streets, it’s on barges. You never stop being assailed.”Giant screens are nothing new, of course. But New York’s streetscape had been permeated as never before with twitchy, adhesively catchy LEDs, a trend that has only accelerated during the pandemic, with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority announcing last summer the addition of 9,000 screens broadcasting “Covid-relevant safety information.”Herald Square, now with a neo-noir flair.Credit…John Taggart for The New York Times“There is advertising everywhere, and it’s a bit of sensory overload,” said Ben Kallos, a City Council member who represents Manhattan’s East Side. Mr. Kallos said LinkNYC, the network of 1,800 sidewalk kiosks around the city providing free Wi-Fi as well as block after block of eye-level digital content, “is pushing the boundary” when it comes to “the amount of advertising people are willing to take.”That said, for all its complexity and clutter, New York’s visual environment is carefully calibrated by zoning codes and the desire of advertisers not to trigger associations with images such as the “Blade Runner” signature motif of a geisha’s face beaming down from a hovering blimp, let alone the monolithic Big Brother figure in Apple’s infamous “1984” commercial (also directed by Mr. Scott).Slip-ups happen, however. Last summer, during protests over the killing of George Floyd, marchers who had gathered near Columbus Circle were shocked to see messages from a billboard overhead sternly telling them to go home and “Don’t be a criminal.”“They were telling people that this isn’t what George Floyd would want, things like that,” said Frederick Joseph, a marketing and communications specialist who is also the author of the recently published New York Times best seller “The Black Friend.”Mr. Joseph was marching beneath the 32-foot-high digital sign — the only such billboard facing Central Park — and was shocked to see the messages accompanied by the face of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo of New York, along with a misleading Twitter handle. (The Moinian Group, a real estate developer that owns the billboard, did not answer several calls.)“There was a countdown basically saying how much time before you were past curfew,” Mr. Joseph added. “And when it got to like 10 minutes before, people started running. It felt like something out of ‘The Hunger Games,’ or ‘Blade Runner.’”Not all of the resemblances to the movie are nightmarish. The retro-noir look “Blade Runner” is credited with has inspired copycats, including Anthony Bourdain, who before his death planned to open a “Blade Runner”-inspired “Asian night market” on the West Side of Manhattan, and Raf Simons, whose 2018 men’s wear show on a steamy, neon-lit night under the Williamsburg Bridge featured models in monklike cocoon coats carrying clear plastic umbrellas.Indeed, one of the subversive triumphs of “Blade Runner” is making techno-fascist dystopia seductive.“It’s supposed to be terrible, but of course it’s mesmerizing,” said James Sanders, the author of “Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies.” Mr. Sanders said that “Blade Runner” originally spoke to a “terror that white middle-class culture was going to be overrun by foreigners.”A helmeted man in bike and other vehicles, whizzing down 32nd Street.Credit…John Taggart for The New York TimesSome parts of Midtown are incontestably gloomy, such as along Lexington Avenue in the 40s, where mannequins seem to outnumber humans, space-helmeted bicyclists swerve around heaps of garbage, and like a jellyfish glowing undersea, any gleam of life only underscores the vacuum.”Just a half-mile south, though, in Manhattan’s Koreatown, the feel is warmer, if slightly edgy, as restaurants have transformed 32nd Street into a vogue-ish outdoor bazaar where you may not feel comfortable unless you’re wearing a neoprene cocoon coat with nozzles for the attachment of heating tubes. It’s not just the diners slurping seolleongtang inside plywood shacks, the cosmetic treatments on offer up glowing stairwells, or the puddles at the diners’ feet (which, although not runoff from acid rain as in “Blade Runner,” may be something worse from nearby Midtown).Scott Geres is the general manager of the Edison Hotel, a Jazz Age showpiece that opened in 1931, when Thomas Edison himself turned on the 26-story building’s lights. Pixelated models’ faces projected from Times Square flood many of its 810 rooms, including the Presidential Suite, where Aaron Judge, the New York Yankees right fielder, spent the 2018 season.Is that the Jolly Green Giant or something more sinister?Credit…John Taggart for The New York TimesFor the last year, Mr. Geres has been one of the few people at the Edison.“For the first month I didn’t leave the building,” said Mr. Geres, 48, who walks up to 25,000 steps a day checking for pipe leaks and fire hazards. “There used to be 5,000 people in this building on a Saturday night. Now it’s just me and one other person on my team.”Mr. Geres said his job is to keep the Edison’s lights flickering behind the plywood shielding windows on the Rum Bar and street-side restaurants. The 700-room Paramount hotel, across West 47th Street, however, is “dark dark,” he said, like so many buildings in Midtown.“Dark dark” is of course the psychic state of much of New York these days, and of Rick Deckard’s mind. In “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” the 1968 novel by Philip K. Dick on which “Blade Runner” is based, Mr. Deckard is tormented by empty apartments — “sometimes he heard them when he was supposed to be asleep.”Childless, communicating via “vidphone,” and drinking himself into oblivion (with Vangelis’s blissfully narcotic score playing in the background, who wouldn’t?), Mr. Deckard spends his time when not hunting fugitive robots — whose vivacity is a rebuke to his own shrunken soul — looking at pictures from before times, specifically, snapshots of possibly imaginary family members.It’s an on-the-nose image of loneliness and lassitude for those “living in the screen bunker,” as the pop psychologist Rob Henderson has called pandemic life. Meanwhile, outside the bunker, intimations of creeping disorder conjure the city of the 1970s, one of the main inspirations for “Blade Runner.”“Places in New York that used to not have advertising now have ads,” said Adrian Benepe, the former New York City Parks commissioner. “You can’t get away from it. It’s in the subways, it’s on the streets, it’s on barges. You never stop being assailed.”Credit…John Taggart for The New York Times“I was spending a lot of time in New York,” Mr. Scott has said of the movie’s filming. “The city back then seemed to be dismantling itself. It was marginally out of control.”At that time, Mr. Scott frequently found himself flying directly to Midtown via a helicopter service from Kennedy Airport that would land atop the former Pan-American (now MetLife) Building straddling Park Avenue. Not long afterward, following a grisly accident, the helicopter service was discontinued.Mr. Benepe sees helicopters as another way “Blade Runner”speaks to the moment.“In ‘Blade Runner’ you have this overhead traffic constantly circling overhead,” he said. “Well, now the ultrawealthy, not only are they no longer in mass transit with us, they’re not even on the roadways. They’re flying in from the Hamptons.”He pointed out that the helicopter charter service Blade recently announced a daily commuter run, set to begin this month, shuttling passengers to Manhattan from Westchester.“Blade Runner”’s class critique is not subtle. A sex worker hunted by Mr. Deckard tries to kill him with his tie. The movie’s arch-villain, the head of an evil biotech corporation, lives at the pinnacle of a Pharaonic temple, and apparently he’s the only character in the movie whose apartment gets sunlight.That home, towering above the city, is as spacious and warm as the other interiors are dismal and claustrophobic. Though, in one of the ways “Blade Runner” seems dated, compared with Pharaonic apartments in Manhattan nowadays, its proportions are not extravagant.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Henry Goldrich, Gear Guru to Rock Stars, Is Dead at 88

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyHenry Goldrich, Gear Guru to Rock Stars, Is Dead at 88The owner of Manny’s Music in Manhattan, he brought wah-wah to Hendrix and Clapton and connected musicians with equipment that helped define their styles.Henry Goldrich in an undated photo in front of his store, Manny’s Music, which until it closed in 2009 was the largest and best-known of the cluster of music shops on West 48th Street in Manhattan.Credit…via Ian GoldrichMarch 4, 2021, 6:29 p.m. ETWhen asked about his musical ability, Henry Goldrich would often demur, “I play cash register.”His stage was Manny’s Music in Manhattan, where Mr. Goldrich, the longtime owner, supplied equipment to a generation of rock stars. But even though he sold instead of strummed, Mr. Goldrich secured an important role in rock by connecting famous musicians with cutting-edge equipment.“To these guys, Henry was the superstar,” his son Judd said. “He was the first guy to get gear they had never seen before.”Mr. Goldrich died on Feb. 16 at his home in Boca Raton, Fla. He was 88.His death was confirmed by his other son, Ian, who said he had been in frail but stable health.Manny’s, which closed in 2009 after 74 years in business, was long the largest and best-known of the cluster of music shops on the West 48th Street block known as Music Row.It was opened in 1935 by Mr. Goldrich’s father, Manny, and it was a second home for Henry since his infancy, when the shop’s clientele of swing stars doted on him. Ella Fitzgerald would babysit for him in the shop when his parents went out for lunch, Ian Goldrich said.By 1968, when his father died at 62, Henry Goldrich had largely taken over operations and had turned the shop into an equipment mecca and hangout for world-renowned artists.He did this by expanding its inventory of the latest gear and by solidifying connections with suppliers that helped him consistently stock high-level instruments and new products.Mr. Goldrich sold guitars to Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Pete Townshend and many others. He was not happy about Mr. Townshend’s penchant for smashing them.Credit…Chester Higgins Jr./The New York TimesAt a time before rock stars were lavished with the latest equipment straight from the manufacturers, Manny’s was favored by top musicians searching for new gear and testing out new equipment.These included two guitar gods of the 1960s, Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton — to whom, Ian Goldrich said, his father recommended the wah-wah pedal, an electronic device that immediately became a staple of both musicians’ approaches. He added that Hendrix would buy scores of guitars on credit and have Mr. Goldrich fine-tune them to the guitarist’s demanding preferences.Many rock and pop classics were either played or written on instruments sold by Mr. Goldrich.John Sebastian, founder of the Lovin’ Spoonful, recalled in an interview how Mr. Goldrich in the mid-1960s helped him select the Gibson J-45 he used on early Spoonful recordings like “Do You Believe in Magic?”Mr. Goldrich similarly matched James Taylor with a quality Martin acoustic guitar early in his career, his son Ian said. And Sting used the Fender Stratocaster Mr. Goldrich sold him to compose “Message in a Bottle” and many other hits for the Police before donating it to the Smithsonian Institution.The photos on the Manny’s Wall of Fame constituted a Who’s Who of popular music. Credit…Chester Higgins Jr./The New York TimesIn 1970, he sold the Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour the 1969 black Stratocaster he played on many of the band’s seminal recordings. It sold at auction in 2019 for a record $3,975,000.Pete Townshend of the Who would order expensive electric guitars by the dozens from Mr. Goldrich, who was not happy when he heard about the guitarist’s penchant for destroying his instrument onstage for theatrical effect.“It was good business,” Ian Goldrich said, “but my father was annoyed that Pete was breaking all the guitars he was selling him.”Unlike many of his flamboyant rock-star customers, Mr. Goodrich always dressed conventionally in a sport coat and kept a blunt demeanor that put his customers at ease.“He had a gruff personality; he treated them all the same,” Ian Goldrich said. “He’d tell Bob Dylan, ‘Sit in the back and I’ll be with you in a minute.’”There was the day in 1985 — it was Black Friday, and the store was packed — that Mick Jagger and David Bowie stopped by together, creating a commotion that halted sales. An annoyed Mr. Goldrich quickly sold them their items and rushed them out.“My father was like, ‘What are you guys doing here today?’” Ian recalled. “He didn’t throw them out, but he was not happy.”When the band Guns N’ Roses asked to shoot part of the video for their 1989 hit “Paradise City” in the store, Ian Goldrich recalled, his father agreed only reluctantly, saying, “OK, but we’re not shutting down for them.”Ever opinionated, Mr. Goldrich told Harry Chapin in 1972 that his new song “Taxi,” at nearly seven minutes, was too lengthy to be a hit. (It reached the Top 40 and is now considered a classic.) And he told Paul Simon, who as a boy had bought his first guitar at Manny’s, that he thought Simon and Garfunkel was a “lousy name” for a group.But he also advised new stars in a fatherly way not to squander their newfound wealth.“He’d take them aside and say, ‘You’re making money now — how are you going to take care of it?’” Ian Goldrich said.From left, the singer Richie Havens, the singer and radio host Oscar Brand and Mr. Goldrich at a celebration of Manny’s Music’s 50th anniversary at the Rainbow Grill in 1985.Credit…Marilyn K. Yee/The New York TimesHenry Jerome Goldrich was born on May 15, 1932, to Manny and Julia Goldrich, and grew up in Brooklyn and in Hewlett on Long Island. After graduating from Adelphi College, he served in the Army in Korea in the mid-1950s and then went to work full time at Manny’s.His father opened the store on West 48th Street, a location he chose because it was close to the Broadway theaters and the 52nd Street jazz clubs, as well as numerous recording studios and the Brill Building, a hub for music publishers. In 1999, Mr. Goldrich sold Manny’s to Sam Ash Music, a rival store, which largely retained the staff until Manny’s closed in 2009.In addition to his sons, Mr. Goldrich is survived by his wife, Judi; his daughter, Holly Goldrich; seven grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.Mr. Goldrich often used his celebrity clientele to market the store. “He recognized value of these people being in the store and it made the business, certainly,” his son Judd said.When a young Eric Clapton, then with the group Cream, was stuck in New York without the money to fly home to England, he offered his amplifiers to Mr. Goldrich to raise funds.“He said, ‘I’ll buy them from you as long as you stencil them with the Cream logo,” Ian said.Then there was the store’s Wall of Fame, thousands of autographed publicity photos of famous customers that constituted a Who’s Who of popular music. Mr. Goldrich helped cultivate the photos, many of which were inscribed to him, and often kept his staff from stacking merchandise in front of them.Mr. Taylor, in a video interview, described being mesmerized by the photos as a teenager and being proud when his own was added. “It was sort of an inside thing, not as celebrated as a Grammy or a gold record or a position on the charts,” he said. “But definitely you had arrived if you were included on that wall.”Mr. Goldrich became close friends with many musicians, including the Who’s bassist, John Entwistle, who attended Judd’s bar mitzvah in New Jersey and hosted the Goldrich family at his Gothic mansion in England. Ian remembered the band’s drummer, Keith Moon, sitting on his father’s lap while drinking cognac at a screening of the film “Tommy.”In a video interview, Mr. Goldrich described selling the violinist Itzhak Perlman an electric violin. When Mr. Perlman tried bargaining, Mr. Goldrich parried by asking if he ever reduced his performance fee.“He said, ‘It’s different, I’m a talent,’” Mr. Goldrich recalled. “I said, ‘I’m a talent in my own way, too.’”That talent was palpable to Mr. Sebastian when he asked Mr. Goldrich to allow him to test out his stock of Gibson acoustic guitars in a merchandise room.“Henry’s famously prickly demeanor receded slightly,” Mr. Sebastian recalled, and he agreed to open early the next morning to allow him in.“He knew exactly what I wanted,” he said. “And I’ll be damned if I didn’t catch Henry smiling as he made out the bill.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Jazz at Lincoln Center Focuses on Music’s Role in Social Justice

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeExplore: A Cubist CollageFollow: Cooking AdviceVisit: Famous Old HomesLearn: About the VaccineAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyJazz at Lincoln Center Focuses on Music’s Role in Social JusticeA new season of video concerts will feature a tribute to renowned jazz vocalists and include new compositions created in collaboration with Bryan Stevenson.This season, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, led by Wynton Marsalis, will feature programs like “Freedom, Justice and Hope” and a concert focusing on John Coltrane.Credit…Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesFeb. 2, 2021With in-person concerts unlikely to return this spring, Jazz at Lincoln Center on Tuesday announced a full season of video presentations, all centered on jazz’s role in the fight for social justice.The spring programming will feature four shows, each one streaming on the center’s website for $20 a ticket. (Prices are lower for members and subscribers.) Each show will remain available for streaming over a period of days.The first concert, “Legacies of Excellence,” will premiere on Feb. 20. Featuring the vocalist Catherine Russell, it explores the contributions of jazz legends through an educational lens, and is presented as part of an initiative called Let Freedom Swing.For the remaining three shows, guests will join the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, led by Wynton Marsalis. On March 26, the ensemble will present “Voices of Freedom,” a celebration of four eminent 20th-century jazz singers: Betty Carter, Billie Holiday, Abbey Lincoln and Nina Simone. A lineup of contemporary vocalists, including Melanie Charles and Shenel Johns, will offer renditions of these figures’ famous works.The orchestra returns on May 21 with “Freedom, Justice, and Hope,” a program featuring new compositions by two rising musicians: the bassist Endea Owens, who will debut a suite honoring the pioneering Black journalist Ida B. Wells; and the trumpeter Josh Evans, who will present a work in response to the 1919 Elaine massacre in Arkansas. The compositions were written in collaboration with the racial-justice activist Bryan Stevenson, who will participate in the concert.The season concludes with a show on June 10 devoted to the music of John Coltrane, including a big-band rendition of his landmark “A Love Supreme.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Piano Bars and Jazz Clubs Reopen, Calling Live Music ‘Incidental’

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best MoviesBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest TheaterBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyPiano Bars and Jazz Clubs Reopen, Calling Live Music ‘Incidental’As the coronavirus continues to spread, Marie’s Crisis Cafe became the latest Manhattan music venue to reopen, claiming that it is not a performance venue.Despite the worsening pandemic, Marie’s Crisis Cafe, a West Village piano bar, reopened with a singalong this week. Like other venues, it says its music is “incidental,” and therefore allowed.Credit…Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesSarah Bahr and Dec. 11, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ETAlthough most indoor live performances have been banned in New York since the coronavirus began its deadly spread in March, about a dozen people turned up Wednesday night at Birdland, the jazz club near Times Square, for a 7 p.m. performance that was billed as dinner with live jazz. They had reservations.Among them was Tricia Tait, 63, of Manhattan, who came for the band, led by the tuba player David Ostwald, which plays the music of Louis Armstrong. Until the pandemic hit, it had performed on most Wednesdays at Birdland. She admitted to health worries “in the back of my mind,” but said, “Sometimes you just have to take a chance and enjoy things.”While the number of daily new coronavirus cases in New York City has been climbing to levels not seen since April, in-person learning has been suspended at public middle schools and high schools, and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo warned this week that indoor dining in the city could soon be banned, Birdland and a number of other noted jazz clubs and piano bars across the city have been quietly offering live performances again, arguing that the music they are presenting is “incidental,” and therefore permitted by the pandemic-era guidelines set by the State Liquor Authority.Those guidelines state that “only incidental music is permissible at this time” and that “advertised and/or ticketed shows are not permissible.” They continue: “Music should be incidental to the dining experience and not the draw itself.”That has not prevented a number of New York venues that are better known for their performances than their cuisine — including Birdland, the Blue Note and Marie’s Crisis Cafe, a West Village piano bar that reopened Monday with a show tune singalong after declaring itself a dining establishment — from offering live music again.“We think it’s incidental,” Ryan Paternite, the director of programming and media at Birdland, said of its calendar of performances that include a brass band and a jazz quartet. “It’s background music. That’s the rule.”The rules have been challenged in court. After Michael Hund, a Buffalo guitarist, filed a lawsuit in August challenging them, a judge in the U.S. District Court in the Western District of New York issued a preliminary injunction last month preventing the state from enforcing its ban on advertised and ticketed shows. “The incidental-music rule prohibits one kind of live music and permits another,” the judge, John L. Sinatra Jr., wrote in his Nov. 13 decision. “This distinction is arbitrary.”The state is appealing the ruling.“The science is clear that mass gatherings can easily turn into superspreader events, and it is unconscionable that businesses would attempt to undermine proven public health rules like this as infections, hospitalizations and deaths continue to rise,” William Crowley, a spokesman for the liquor authority, said Thursday. He noted that a federal judge in New York City had ruled in another case that the restrictions were constitutional. He said that the state would “continue to vigorously defend our ability to fight this pandemic whenever it is challenged.”But it is unclear what, exactly, “incidental” music means. Does that mean a guitar player in the corner? A six-person jazz band like the one that played at Birdland on Wednesday night? The Harlem Gospel Choir, which is set to perform at the Blue Note on Christmas Day? Mr. Crowley did not respond to questions seeking further clarity on Thursday, or about what enforcement actions the state has taken.Customers at Marie’s Crisis Cafe.Credit…Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesRobert Bookman, a lawyer who represents a number of New York’s live music venues, said venues interpreted the ruling as allowing them to advertise and sell tickets for incidental music performances during dinner.So venues have chosen their words carefully. They are taking dinner reservations, and are announcing calendars of lineups for what Mr. Paternite, of Birdland, characterizes as “background music during dinner.” Unlike Mac’s Public House, the Staten Island bar that declared itself an autonomous zone and was recently lampooned on “Saturday Night Live,” they have no interest in openly flouting regulations.Mr. Paternite said that Birdland, after laying off nearly all of its 60 employees in March, is now back to what he calls a “skeleton staff” of about 10 people.“It’s a huge risk for us to be open,” he said. “And it only brings in a pittance. But it helps us out in our agreement with our landlord, because to pay our rent over time and stay current on our utilities and taxes, we need to stay open. But we’re losing massive amounts every day.”If venues don’t reopen now, he fears, they may never do so. The Jazz Standard, a beloved 130-seat club on East 27th Street in Manhattan, announced last week that it would close permanently because of the pandemic. Arlene’s Grocery, a Lower East Side club that hosted the Strokes before they became well known, said it was “on life support” and, without aid, would have to close on Feb. 1.Randy Taylor, the bartender and manager at Marie’s Crisis Cafe, said the last time the piano bar had served food was probably back in the 1970s — or perhaps earlier. “There’s a very old kitchen that’s totally disconnected upstairs,” he said. Its dining options are extremely limited: It currently offers $4 bowls of chips and salsa. “We are required to sell them,” he said. “We can’t just give them away.”Steven Bensusan, the president of Blue Note Entertainment Group, said that he hopes the state does not move to shut down indoor dining.“I know cases are spiking,” he said. “But we’re doing our best to keep people safe, and I hope we can continue to stay open. We’re not going to be profitable, but we have the ability to give some people work who’ve been with us for a long time.”The clubs said that they were taking precautions. At the Blue Note, which reopened Nov. 27, the formerly shared tables are now six feet apart and separated by plexiglass barriers, and its two nightly dinner seatings are each capped at 25 percent capacity, or about 50 people. At Marie’s Crisis Cafe, where the masked pianist Alexander Barylski was ensconced behind clear shielding on Wednesday night as he led a jubilant group chorus of “Frosty the Snowman,” Mr. Taylor said that tables were separated by plastic barriers, and that the venue conducted temperature checks and collected contact tracing information at the door.Daniel Wiseman, left, and Rindi Klarberg are greeted by Moni Penda, right, at Birdland, a noted jazz club that now calls its live music “incidental.” Credit…Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesMarie’s Crisis Cafe had been livestreaming shows on Instagram and its Facebook group page, but Mr. Taylor said it wasn’t the same. On Wednesday night, 10 customers belted out holiday tunes through masks, some sipping their first drinks at a venue since March.“There have been some tears,” Mr. Taylor said. “People really, really missed us. We can’t see their smiles through their masks, but their eyes say it all.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More